SAP S/4HANA Update for 2022 – Further automate e-i...
Technology Blogs by SAP
Learn how to extend and personalize SAP applications. Follow the SAP technology blog for insights into SAP BTP, ABAP, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP HANA, and more.
Tax authorities have been continuously increasing the number and the complexity of legal mandates, making the adoption of new technologies essential to remain compliant. In fact, after the introduction of electronic documents, tax authorities are now controlling the exchange of electronic invoices between businesses forcing enterprises to embed tax technologies within business processes and ensure electronic documents and financial records match to data in the tax authorities’ systems.
Last year, SAP introduced SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, a solution to fulfil local compliance regulations, from electronic documents to statutory reporting, ensuring consistency and facilitating reconciliation. The solution also enables enterprises to automate compliance processes and achieve efficiencies via standardized compliance operations which are continuously kept up to date with new and evolving legal mandates by SAP.
Since last year, the ready-to-use scenarios have been expanded to cover 416 regulations (35 new scenarios with the latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud releases) across 57 countries, including SAF-T reporting for Romania, e-invoices for Saudi Arabia and Switzerland, new withholding tax reports from Germany, Colombia, and Chile. The full list of ready-to-use compliance scenarios currently available can be found here:
Beyond compliance, SAP Document and Reporting Compliance has also been expanded with new capabilities to further automate business processes and increase efficiency of compliance operations.
Electronic supplier purchase orders and sale order requests
As governments are expanding the adoption of the Peppol Network, enterprises can now start to exchange electronically purchase orders and sale order requests eliminating the need of EDI and PDF files, emails and paper documents. Similarly to best practices already established for invoices, payments and good movements, SAP Document and Reporting Compliance enables business users to automatically create electronic orders within the business processes and exchange electronically without manual intervention. As a result, they can easily monitor the status and take any required follow up action leveraging a standardized and centralized monitor which be utilized across all electronic documents worldwide.
Fig. 1: Centralized cockpit with electronic supplier purchase orders and sale order requests
Streamlined withholding tax reporting
Existing capabilities for withholding tax reporting have been enhanced to further automate operational processes. These consist of:
Traceable withholding tax adjustments. With the introduction of withholding tax reporting date as a new attribute on all accounting documents and a new activity manage withholding tax items in SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, tax experts now have the ability to seamlessly exclude documents pending corrections or include late corrections without offline workarounds or manual tracking. In addition to increased efficiency, this also enables traceability within the system of record to better support tax audits.
Automatic processing of withholding tax certificates via email. With the introduction of a new address type in the business partners master data, it’s now possible to capture a contact for withholding tax certificates and, leveraging a native integration with output management, tax experts can automatically send withholding certificates via email to suppliers and customers upon creation of the corresponding tax return.
Fig. 2: Manage Withholding Tax Items application
Automated regression tester for statutory reporting
An automated regression tester has been released to minimize the manual effort required to perform regression testing across the hundreds or thousands of statutory reports required worldwide.
Using a sample report definition, the automated regression tester can automatically regenerate all reports and compare the output (content, preview, analytics, validations, etc.). If any anomaly is identified, it will automatically notify users to investigate. The discrepancies are also summarized in a centralized dashboard, so technical users can efficiently review the outcomes and focus on the implementation of required solutions.
With the automated regression tester, enterprises no longer need to rely on spot checks during SAP S/4HANA upgrades or OSS notes installation, reducing the risk of operational disruptions and, ultimately non-compliance.
Fig. 3: Automated regression tester for statutory reporting
To Learn More
For more detailed insights on SAP Document and Reporting Compliance and Global Tax Management, see:
To learn more about the business value of the finance innovations as part of the SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud releases, read this blog from Michel Haesendonckx which includes additional product update videos for 2022.